The Hindu : Front Page : Those happy golden years

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Sunday, Apr 20, 2008
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Those happy golden years

Old age is contentment time

CHICAGO: News flash for rock stars and teenagers: it turns out everything does not go downhill as we age. The golden years really are golden.

That is according to new research in the U.S. that found the happiest people are the oldest, and older adults are more socially active than the stereotype of the lonely senior suggests.

“The good news is that with age comes happiness,” said study author Yang Yang, a University of Chicago sociologist. “Life gets better in one’s perception as one ages.”

A certain amount of distress in old age is inevitable, including aches, pains and deaths of loved ones. But older people generally have learned to be more content with what they have than the young, Mr. Yang said.

This is partly because older people have learned to lower their expectations and accept their achievements, said Duke University aging expert Linda George.

Ms. George, who was not involved in the study, believes the research is important because the general public continues to think that “late life is far from the best stage of life, and they don’t look forward to it.”

Mr. Yang’s findings are based on periodic face-to-face interviews with a nationally representative sample of Americans from 1972 to 2004. About 28,000 people aged 18 to 88 took part.

There were ups and downs in overall happiness levels during the study, generally corresponding with good and bad economic times. But at every stage, older people were the happiest.

While younger blacks and poor people tended to be less happy than whites and wealthier people, those differences faded as people aged.

In general, the odds of being happy increased 5 per cent with every 10 years of age.

Overall, about 33 per cent of the people reported being very happy at age 88, versus about 24 per cent of those aged between 18 and their early 20s. And throughout the study years, most of the subjects reported being very happy or pretty happy; less than 20 per cent said they were not too happy.

A separate University of Chicago study found that about 75 per cent of people aged 57 to 85 engage in one or more social activities at least every week. Those include socialising with neighbours, attending religious services, volunteering or going to group meetings.

Those in their 80s were twice as likely as those in their 50s to do at least one of these activities.

“People’s social circles do tend to shrink a little as they age — that is mainly where that stereotype comes from, but that image of the isolated elderly really falls apart when we broaden our definition of what social connection is,” said study co-author Benjamin Cornwell, also a University of Chicago researcher.

Mr. Cornwell’s nationally representative study was based on in-home interviews with 3,005 people in 2005-06. While it did not include nursing home residents, only about 4 per cent of Americans aged 75 to 84 are in nursing homes, Cornwell said. — AP

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